Alpha build 22 is live — and you need to restart Steam before you play. This build changes how the game and the server talk to each other, so a copy from build 21 cannot connect at all. If you get a connection error, that is all it is: quit Steam completely, start it again, let it update, and you are in.
Whispers finally work
Whisper has been in the game since chat shipped, and it has been unusable that whole time — there was no way to choose who you were whispering to, so typing in the tab just got you "Who do you want to whisper to?". That was our fault and it is fixed.
- Click anyone's name in chat and the whisper tab opens aimed at them, with the cursor already in the box.
- Whispers wait for people who are offline. Sending one to someone who had logged off used to be refused and thrown away. Now it is kept and handed to them the moment they next log in, marked unread so they actually see it.
- The whisper tab lists your conversations, most recent first, so a conversation from yesterday is still there.
A settings screen
Press Esc and Settings now sits between Cancel and Quit Game.
DISPLAY has your frame rate limit, resolution scale and VSync. GRAPHICS has the five quality settings and an AUTO-DETECT button that benchmarks your machine and sets them for you. Everything applies the moment you touch it and is remembered — no Apply button, nothing to confirm.
Two rows are not finished yet: Window mode and Resolution will change your display and then put it back after a few seconds, because the "can you still see this?" confirmation that has to go with them is not built. Everything else on both tabs works. We would rather give you the rest of the screen now than hold it back for those two.
Your graphics card gets a break
The game had never limited its frame rate, so it drew as fast as your card physically could — in every view, including the sector map, which costs almost nothing. One tester measured 177 frames a second at 89 °C while doing nothing but looking at the map. Every frame past your monitor's refresh rate was heat and fan noise and nothing else.
Frames are now capped at 60 by default. On a 60 Hz monitor that looks identical and asks about a third as much of your card. On a higher-refresh monitor it is a default, not a rule — Esc → Settings, set the frame rate limit to whatever your monitor runs at, or turn it off entirely. It is remembered.
Also in this build
- Fleets you leave out in space are still there when you come back. Log out with a fleet deployed and the server used to forget it had launched, while the fleet sat in planet view refusing to respond.
- Alliance chat is built, and hidden. The channel, the rooms and the message history are all finished — but there is still no way to create or join an alliance, so nobody has one and nobody sees the tab. It switches itself on for you the moment that changes.
Your commander, base, ships and fleets are untouched. Nothing has been wiped since build 19.
The full list is on the changelog, and if something is broken, tell us — that is what this is for.